Heart Eyes, Vol. 235: Brown-Sugar Brown-Butter Shortbread and Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake
Friends! Hello. Happy Friday. Happy last week of January! This month so often feels like a slog to me, but this year I’m surprised to see the end of it so soon. Maybe because I’ve been taking it (more or less) easy? Whatever it is, I’ll take it, and maybe double down for these final few days…and then see how February feels. Those books/knits/naps aren’t going to read/knit/take themselves, are they? If you’d like to join me, I think you should. After all, I think you—yes, you, specifically—are doing great.
This week: doubling up on the baked goods!
What to Bake: Brown-Butter Brown-Sugar Shortbread
This holiday season was, as far as I can tell, an anomaly. Typically I talk a good game about party snacks and living on pretzel toffee alone, but in reality I get to about December 10 and all I want is a salad. This year I semi-intentionally took an approach to weekday cooking and eating that was both mindful and a pleasingly low lift—“what can I make that is very easy and mostly vegetables”—and…I guess it worked? I turned my kitchen into a cookie-box production site later in the month and, for better or worse, still never really hit that wall—and found myself turning the corner into the new year and dreaming without a hint of dissonance about a fresh wave of baking projects.
Which brings us to the Brown-Butter Brown-Sugar Shortbread recipe Deb released just late enough in December not to make it into my cookie box planning. Did you catch all of those words? Brown butter. Brown sugar. Shortbread! So many of my favorite things, all in one place! I’ve now rectified the problem and am pleased to report that it’s just as excellent as it sounds—crisp and nutty and with all the complex flavors you’d expect from brown butter and brown sugar together. This is next year’s cookie boxes, not exactly sorted, but…on their way, for sure.
Also: I love this kind of recipe, in which the ingredient list is short, the active time is minimal, and the genius of it comes from a smart process. This shortbread is a reworked version of somewhat capricious cookie waaaaay back in the Smitten Kitchen archives, and I find it so satisfying that after all these years Deb managed to re-engineer it (and it is a question of engineering!) into something that is easier to execute and also works every time for everyone. That is a person who really knows, and cares about, her cookie mechanics! Deb, I salute you. Everyone else, I think you know what to do.
What to Bake: Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake
OK, I just really wanted to talk to you all about this cake. Again.
Some people know exactly where they were when they heard of the Kennedy assassination, or when the Twin Towers fell; I will always remember the first time I made Alison Roman’s Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake (unlocked NYT link). It was early March of 2020; we weren’t locked down yet, but heading in that direction, and I offered my friend Christine a cake bribe to help me wallpaper the back wall of my kitchen one Saturday. The quid pro quo wasn’t at all even, but Christine is kind, and I’m so glad we got it done—it was our last chance for over a year, and it was certainly nicer to spend those long indoor months with those pretty oranges than without them.
Anyway, that cake has been a favorite of mine ever since, and it’s especially welcome in these gray days of January—I’ve made and shared two of them this week alone. What a star of a recipe, with that tender crumb, that highlighter-yellow color, and those toasty sugared lemon slices on top! I make it with yogurt instead of sour cream, and skip the unnecessary steps of zesting and juicing the lemon into little bowls, and I’ll add an extra lemon’s worth of slices to the top if I have it. I’m always happy to see it and even happier to feed it to other people. Maybe you’d like to, too?
Blockbuster Review: You’ve Got Mail (1998)
I think it’s fair to say that objectively this movie is sort of odd and meandering and may not exactly hold up in the end (has Joe Fox really made things right?). And yet: I know every word and breath and beat of it by heart, and boy did I want that Kathleen Kelly haircut at the time.